13 Assassins puts an imaginative modern slant on Japan's feudal system

Friday 6 May 2011 09:16 BST

A flashy film-maker of a different sort is Takashi Miike, the Michael Winterbottom of Japan, who seems determined with each new movie to do something entirely different from his last.

Sometimes it works (Audition, Ishi the Killer) and sometimes it doesn't. But it was always odds-on that a samurai movie made by him would provide very watchable entertainment. What's special about 13 Assassins is a 45-minute battle scene in which 13 heroic warriors take on the vastly superior army of a wickedly sadistic Shogun lord.

Kurosawa would have been proud of this coruscating finale, even if there's rather more blood and gore than he might have countenanced. It's the high point of a film that transports us back into Japan's feudal world while putting an imaginative modern slant on it.

The seemingly suicidal mission means that each of the samurai has to be first carefully selected and then trained to perfection, and this less interesting part of a film that makes frequent bows both to the original 13 Assassins and to The Seven Samurai has to be traversed before the big climax. It's not that the stately acting and grunting screenplay don't work - it's just that we've seen it all before, done just as well.

The crunch finale is the point, however. The face-off is in a "village of death", a deserted community where our heroes prepare a series of booby traps to compensate for the fact that they are outnumbered. One by one the enemy fall into them, but even then the 13 have to rely on their expert swordsmanship and battle-hardened training to win. Miike is the kind of film-maker who thrives on excess but still manages some kind of credulity and loads of spectacle.